Game of Snipers

by Stephen Hunter

  He took the shells and, one by one, loaded them into the Accuracy International ten-shot magazine. As the box filled, the spring tightened and fought him more urgently. He squeezed the last one in only by applying the full pressure of his thumb against the shaft of the brass, after sliding it between the flanges of the mag and urging it back flat against its rear plate.

  There! Again, something about a magazine fully loaded. You held it, feeling its density, feeling the pressure of its compressed spring, feeling its urgency to offer its cargo up to the slide of the bolt, which would pluck them, one by one, into the chamber, like a burnt offering of some kind.

  He rocked the magazine into place, felt it catch, rotated it upward, felt it lock in place with a satisfying reverberant click. He had only to ram the bolt home, to insert the first of the ten into the chamber, and wait until at last his target came into view, a small human speck in the lens from so far away, who, as he would have to, would go to stillness, not knowing he was setting himself for the shot that would kill him.

  Juba checked his watch.

  More than an hour to go.

  Now to relax, perhaps pray again, perhaps let serenity and will roll through his body, until he became one with the rifle, one with the ammunition, one with the mission.

  Something moved in front of him. But it was only a helicopter, a speck in the sky miles away, vectoring in for some kind of rooftop landing in the far, magnificent city across the river.

  1350

  She tried. You could see her trying. She gave it her all, her belief, her imagination, the intelligence leveraged into her brain by the weight of a mother’s endless grief, all the pain of back alley beatings and rapes, all the subsequent pain in the recovery, all the willed forgetting. She tried.

  Still, the message was clear: no sale.

  “You don’t have to say a thing,” said Mr. Gold. “I can read your face.”

  “It’s magnificent,” she said. “You’re so brilliant, each of you. I sense your intellect in every stroke, in every inference, in every leap. And it makes sense. It follows so logically, one point to another, one clue to the next, all of it coheres, makes policy sense, makes world-historical sense, makes religious sense, even by their standards. As a Moslem, it makes sense to me. As a tourist in Baghdad, it makes sense. As an amateur spy, it makes sense. As a rape victim, as a pauper who’s spent a fortune on the same goal—on all of that—it makes sense. I applaud you.”

  “But,” said Mr. Gold, “you do not buy it?”

  She smiled, though deep in that smile was the weight of loss, and the whole room read it: Mrs. McDowell regrets to inform you that you are full of shit.

  Silence in the room. One of the fluorescents had gone out, so shadows haunted the place. The batch of them faced the woman, who wore no makeup, as she hadn’t had time to put it on, who sat before them in dumpy jeans and a Boys’ Latin T-shirt, her cheap reading glasses slightly askew. Her hair had looked better, as had she. But none of that mattered. Only her reaction mattered.

  “Is it a feeling you have?” asked Nick. “Or is it something specific?”

  “It’s that I love everything about it except it.” Then she said, “Do all of you love it? Do you have any doubts?”

  “I will not let them answer,” said Nick, “because that would give you a frame in which to couch your own objections, and that is of no use to us. What is only of use to us is what you bring to it.”

  “I will try to put into words what I feel,” she said. “If you find value in it, that’s well and good. How much time do we have?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Time is our concern, not yours. No one here will look at a watch, no one will sigh.”

  Swagger realized how professional Nick could be. It must have killed him to say such a thing, for indeed time was clicking away, remorselessly, as it was now 1440, and the thing would happen—or so they reckoned—at 1500. Each second made any kind of response to anything she said more unlikely.

  “Do you want a Coke? A cup of coffee?” asked Nick.

  “Get the Coke,” said Swagger. “The coffee here sucks.”

  Everybody laughed. Maybe that helped a little.

  “I’m fine,” she said. Then she said, “His mind doesn’t work like that.”

  They waited for an amplification, but nobody said a word to rush her. They found the discipline to let her form her own words in her own time.

  “I have been on this guy since he killed my son. That’s over fifteen years. I have learned a little. Not much.”

  What had she learned?

  “It’s too straightforward. You’ve concluded he wants to kill Mogul. Even if you didn’t want to say it, or were prevented from saying it, your country’s history forced you to think that he wanted to kill Mogul.”

  She was right. Maybe Nick had been wrong. Maybe in suppressing that interpretation he had made it all the more inevitable.

  “But if he really wanted to kill Mogul,” she said, “you would be all set up to prevent him from killing somebody else. You wouldn’t know it was Mogul. You’d think it was, say—oh, I don’t know—Hillary. There would be indicators all along—hints, subtle suggestions, the whole shadow show—all of it to convince you that it was Hillary. And the shot on Mogul would come as a complete surprise. It would utterly stun you. You’d have invested everything in saving Hillary from a threat that didn’t exist.”

  Again, silence. Not a single Hillary joke.

  “Think how he did it in Baghdad. The IED detonations drove the marines back to what they thought was safety. But what they thought was safety was the kill box. Lure and distraction: that’s his specialty. He lures you into one situation, twists it against you.”

  “We thought we were hunting him,” Bob said. “He was hunting us.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  The room went still.

  “He’s very tricky. It’s not what you think it is. He’s come up with something else.”

  Finally, Nick spoke—but not to her.

  “What have we missed? Anybody?”

  Swagger said, “All the gun stuff is hard. He will shoot at 1,847 over water in close to fifty-degree humidity with very little wind. He will use a .338 Lapua Magnum of a certain powder load, case preparation, and bullet choice and weight. You can’t argue that away.”

  “So what isn’t hard? What is interp, as opposed to fact?”

  “Behavior,” said Gold, from his well of ancient experience. “The hardest thing. You count on one thing, another happens. Always.”

  “Let’s ID the behavior, then,” said Nick.

  “Mogul will show up today at 1500. Juba’s known it. It seems solid. They believed it to be solid enough to plan on,” said Chandler.

  “Mogul will address the crowd,” said Neill. “It isn’t planned, it isn’t announced, it’s on paper nowhere, but it’s his behavior: give him a friendly crowd and there he is, screwing Renegade out of attention and getting big pleasure from that, big as life, ready for a bullet.”

  “Ready for a bullet,” said Chandler. “Meaning ‘still.’ He has to be still because of Swagger’s time in flight data. Time in flight is not negotiable. It’s the iron law of physics.”

  “Stillness,” said Gold. “The young woman is onto something.”

  “Go on,” said Nick.

  “The time in flight,” continued Mr. Gold, “demands that he must be still. We assume that stillness is a speech near a body of water, and it turns out that Mogul indeed had a long-settled speech planned for that day right at the banks of the East River. Knowing that, anyone could plan backwards from it, could see what a brilliant bodyguard of lies it would make, how perfectly it might cover the real operation at about the same time, but which would turn on another form of stillness.”

  “Stillness,” said Nick. “Anybody?”

  “Eating?” said Neill.<
br />
  “Inside a restaurant. Not likely.”

  “No joke: going to bathroom?” Bob said.

  “Again inside, not available to a long shot from far away across a river.”

  “Reviewing stand?” said Neill. “Parade ground. The theater? A movie? I can’t—”

  Then Mrs. McDowell said, “My father was one of those go-getters. Never still—anywhere, anytime, any way. Except one place in his life where his stillness used to drive people crazy. I know. I caddied for him. He was putting.”

  1445

  Allah, Thy servant beseeches Thee again. O Lord of all, it is in Your favor I commit myself and give myself, for life, for death, for fate, for destiny. I smite Thy enemies. I drive them to destruction. I ensure our triumph. I ensure Your mastery over all. I enable their submission and the power of Your will as it becomes not regional but global, as it destroys the Satan that is America, as it ruins this land of decadence and corruption and evil. I evoke in Your name all of those who have died to put me at this spot and make me Your instrument, and, consecrated in their blood, I perform my act. I am humble and contrite before You, knowing that now You shall reach down and infuse Your servant with power, serenity, vision, and brilliance.

  It was almost time. He gently shoved the bolt forward, feeling it take one of the cartridges off the stack in the magazine, engaged it, and slid it gently, smoothly, forward into the chamber. He locked the bolt down and, with his finger, touched the safety switch on the right side of the receiver, checking that it was off.

  1455

  On one of the screens they could see the crowd gathering in New York, the dais beginning to fill. The other showed men in calm control in the Command Center downstairs, as they orchestrated the pieces for the checkmate that nobody watching now believed would never happen.

  Nick was on the phone.

  “Get me Secret Service, their Command Center. Yes, ASAP, this could be Code Red.”

  He waited.

  “Jackson, Command” came on the voice at the other end.

  “Bill, Nick Memphis over at Hoover, I’m going to put you on speaker for my people, okay?”

  “Yeah. But, Nick, shouldn’t you be engaged in the New York op? Aren’t you up there, and—”

  “Long story. Politics.”

  “In this town? What a surprise!”

  “Something just come up. Assuming our bad guy is going to go today, I have to ask, do you have any protectees on a golf course?”

  “On a golf course?”

  “Yeah, I—”

  “That’s mucho classified, bud.”

  “Secure line, emergency procedure, maybe go to Code Red on this one. Come on, Bill, give it to me, this is real important.”

  “I don’t know how you found out. Nobody’s supposed to know this shit.”

  1458

  He could see them now. Still too far out, but sharply outlined in the Schmidt & Bender, two figures, next to the golf cart. A good one hundred and fifty from the green. The tall one—too far to make out details, he was an amoeba to the eye, even blown up twenty-five times due to the genius of Germanic glass grinding—addressed the ball, concentrated, and rotated back smoothly to equipoise, paused a second, unleashed a swing.

  Through the scope, Juba could not follow the ball, but he could tell from the instant dejection in the tall man’s posture that the shot had not gone well. But instead of relinquishing his club and jumping into the cart for taxi service onward, the man reached into his pocket, took out a second ball, and dropped it on the grass. The same ceremony of addressing, shifting, fidgeting, adjusting and counteradjusting, gathering, squeezing his concentration to an even higher degree, and the silver shaft flashed in the sun, and another slashing stroke was delivered.

  This time, success, as the tall man pivoted in follow-through, turned back, putting hand to eyes to shield them from sun, following the ball as it went where it had been directed. He could not contain a bit of leap as the ball must have smacked on the green and rolled toward the hole. Elated, he accepted a handshake from his assistant and got into the cart, which now began its short journey to the green, some 1,847 yards from Juba.

  1459

  “Whenever he’s in town on a Thursday, he goes to a certain course and has a private round. It’s secure, because it’s on a military post closed to the public, and of course the MPs do a security sweep and close the place down for the afternoon. They close the whole post down, in fact. It’s just our guy and his caddy, for therapy, for escape, for fun. Every Thursday. He carries a bucket of balls, and he’ll hit—”

  “Who?” yelled Nick.

  “Renegade.”

  It made sudden, savage sense. Renegade was beloved by millions, a beacon of racial pride, honor, and integrity, a hero to the left. Dump him with a .338 to the thoracic, and those millions would go insane with rage, especially as it came out the shooter was a white racist who’d just unleashed a ton of vile racist hate speak under his own name—Brian A. Waters—on the Darknet and had escaped, cleanly and mysteriously, as if abetted by some Deep State conspiracy. Would we ever come back from that one?

  “Where?” said Nick.

  “The golf course at Fort Lesley J. McNair in the southeast, off the Anacostia. About a mile from you.”

  “Is there any spot on the course where he’s vulnerable—”

  “The eighth green is at the edge of the river, nearly a mile wide at that point. Next to the National War College. I suppose if you knew he was there and you were on the other side of the river and had a high vantage point—”

  “He’s there now?”

  “He would be. Arrived at one. Usually on the course about three hours on a Thursday afternoon. He’d be just getting to the eighth green about now.”

  “Call your detail and get him off the course, and I mean this fucking second.”

  “No detail. No iPhone. That’s the point, he enjoys being cut off, so it’s just him and the golf ball. I can get the guys in the clubhouse out there, but I don’t know if they can make it in time.”

  “Do it, do it, do it!” said Nick.

  He looked up.

  “They knew some Saudi billionaire had hired him for a speech. Big dollars. They knew that would keep him in town this day, and since it was Thursday, he’d go to the course. Later, they found out about Mogul’s reaction, and Juba saw how he could run that as cover story.”

  “Mrs. McDowell’s helicopter on the roof,” said Swagger. “I need a rifle.”

  1502

  It turned out the ball hadn’t quite made it to the green. It landed a few feet short, fairway all the way, far from any sand, but a few feet shy of the manicured grass. Good chance to work on the short game.

  Hmm . . . Long putt or short chip? Decisions, decisions.

  Why not both?

  Do it, thought Juba. The tiny figure stood exactly against the red dot at the center of the scope, the adjustments perfect, everything as it should be, as Allah had willed it.

  But he wouldn’t be 1,847, not just yet.

  He’d be at about 1,865, a few yards off the edge of the lush green circle that sported its silly little flag, which, incidentally, was limp, testifying to lack of wind.

  Do it! he told himself again.

  But the target was not at 1,847. Everything was set for 1,847. Another few seconds, a minute perhaps.

  The golfer elected to go with a chip. The drill—address, adjust, square up, bear down—all over again. Then a short, clipped backswing—more chop than swing—and he uncoiled, very much under control.

  Whatever happened, it was not good.

  He laughed—the man was enjoying himself—and waited until his assistant brought another club and another ball.

  He dropped the ball to earth.

  Address, adjust, square up, bear down, head still and down. No backswing, just a kind of contr
olled shove, and this time the result was better.

  His assistant came to him, and the two men slapped hands.

  Renegade walked onto the green.

  1502.37

  On the roof, under the thunder of beating rotors, Nick was leaning into the cockpit of the State Police helicopter, screaming at the pilot.

  “Stay low, due east, Lieutenant, you’re zeroing in on the National War College at river’s edge, can’t miss it, huge building, like a temple, or a capitol, or something.”

  “Yes, sir,” the pilot was saying.

  “You have to go beyond to the middle of the river. We’ll be looking at the tallest building in Anacostia with river frontage—say, a mile off the War College. Your copilot is on binocs, I’m on binocs, we’re looking for an upper-story window that’s open. He won’t be hanging out, he’ll be well back. You want to insert yourself between him and his target. We’ll take the shot if we have to, Swagger will counterfire if he gets—”

  “Sixth floor,” shouted Bob. “He was sixty-seven feet higher than the target in Wyoming. Each story ten feet. He’ll be on the sixth floor!”

  And at that point, Neill spilled onto the roof, rifle in one hand, box of red Hornady ammo in the other. Chandler was just behind.

  “It’s Juba’s,” he said. “It was one floor down, so much closer.”

  Swagger and Nick ran to the chopper and climbed in, and Neill reached them a second later. He handed the weapon to the sniper.

  It was familiar to Swagger, knowing its curves, its feel, its distribution of weight, its easy pointability. He’d used it in Vietnam, Remington’s classic 700, as solid and tight as any assembly line could turn out.